Visit Michael Scott's Official Facebook Page HereQuest for The Codex (learn about the book and enter contests) website Here

Fantasy Book Critic is very excited to be a part of Michael Scott's Blog Tour, in honor of the release of The Necromancer, the fourth book in his series.

Michael Scott is the author of the popular YA series, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flammel. This internationally-known series introduces readers to legendary historical and mythological figures—weaving history, mystery and magic together seamlessly. Foreign rights for the series have been licensed in 36 countries and the first three books, The Alchemyst, The Magician, and The Sorceress, were all New York Times bestsellers. The series has now sold more than 1 million copies.

For more information on The Necromancer, the whole series, to play a fun game and to enter a fun contest visit Michael Scott's website for the book here.

If you enjoy what Michael Scott has to say here, he will be visiting two other blogs on his blog tour. He will be at Mundie Moms on June 1st and Cleaverly Inked on June 2nd.

Have you ever stopped to consider that we are living in an age of magic?

In the early 1960’s, Arthur C Clarke, the great science fiction writer wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic…”

Think about it for a moment, and now consider the world we live in: we are surrounded by “magic”. Every day we use and take for granted technology that would have been incomprehensible to our parents, inconceivable to our grandparents and unimaginable to our great-grandparents.

In myth, legend and fantasy, magicians generate light: we can do that. They can talk to their minions in crystal balls and glass mirrors – we can do that too. Wizards have access to vast bodies of ancient lore – we have that too. And we can fly too. Sadly, we can also destroy the world – just like every dark magician.

Technology. Magic.

Every day, we access entire libraries of knowledge. When I was growing up, an Encyclopedia Britannica occupied four shelves of the bookcase. It was out of date the moment it arrived, each book was printed in a tiny eye-watering font and reading it took a genuine effort. Now, the encyclopedia comes on a single DVD and is filled with animations, pictures, online links and is updated regularly.

In my pocket I have a 120 gigabyte mp3 player. It holds about 30,000 songs or 25,000 photos. The first gramophone discs were10 inches across and made of brittle shellac. They were heavy, delicate and could only be played on cumbersome players. Even when the size was standardized in the 1940’s, single discs (usually with only two or three songs on them) had a seven inch diameter. So I have the equivalent of 10,000 single discs on in my pocket. Today, we all have the ability to listen to more music in a single day than our parents would have heard in their entire lifetimes.

We communicate with people on the other side of the world instantaneously, send and receive files in real time and see images across the world, from the moon, the depths of the ocean.

The latest generation of computers are extraordinarily fast and sophisticated, on average doubling in power every 2 years and in truth we have no idea where this technology is taking us.

Diseases which would have killed our grandparents have, in many cases, been conquered. The advances in medicine are truly magical.

Magic hasn’t gone away, it just rebranded itself. And yet, we take all of this magic – sorry, advanced technology – for granted. And that is such a shame.